Global Research, April 24, 2019
The Rutherford
Institute 23 April 2019
Region: USA
“Children are being targeted and sold
for sex in America every day.”—John Ryan, National Center for Missing &
Exploited Children
Children, young girls—some as young
as 9 years old—are
being bought and sold for sex in America. The average age for a young woman
being sold for sex is now 13 years old.
This is America’s dirty little
secret.
Sex trafficking—especially when it
comes to the buying and selling of young girls—has become big business in
America, the fastest
growing business in
organized crime and the second
most-lucrative commodity traded illegally after drugs and guns.
As investigative journalist Amy
Fine Collins notes,
“It’s become more lucrative
and much safer to sell malleable teens than drugs or guns. A pound of heroin or an AK-47 can be retailed once,
but a young girl can be sold 10 to 15 times a day—and a ‘righteous’ pimp
confiscates 100 percent of her earnings.”
Consider this: every two
minutes, a child is exploited in the sex industry.
According to USA Today, adults
purchase children for sex at least 2.5 million times a year in the United States.
Who buys a child for sex? Otherwise
ordinary men from
all walks of life.
“They could be
your co-worker, doctor, pastor or spouse,” writes journalist Tim Swarens, who
spent more than a year investigating the sex trade in America.
In Georgia alone, it is estimated
that 7,200 men
(half of them in their 30s) seek to purchase sex with adolescent girls each
month, averaging roughly
300 a day.
On average, a child might be raped by 6,000
men during a five-year period of servitude.
It is estimated that at least 100,000 children—girls and
boys—are bought and sold for sex in the U.S. every year, with as many as 300,000 children in danger of being
trafficked each year. Some of these children are forcefully abducted, others
are runaways, and still others are sold into the system by relatives and
acquaintances.
“Human trafficking—the commercial
sexual exploitation of American children and women, via the Internet, strip
clubs, escort services, or street prostitution—is on its way to becoming one of the
worst crimes in the U.S.,”
said prosecutor Krishna Patel.
This is an industry that revolves
around cheap sex on the fly, with young girls and women who are sold to 50 men
each day for $25 a piece,
while their handlers make
$150,000 to $200,000 per child each year.
This is not a problem found only in
big cities.
It’s happening everywhere, right
under our noses, in suburbs, cities and towns across the nation.
As Ernie Allen of
the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children points out,
Don’t fool yourselves into believing
that this is merely a concern for lower income communities or immigrants.
It is estimated that there are 100,000 to
150,000 under-aged child sex workers in the U.S. These girls aren’t volunteering to be sex
slaves. They’re being lured—forced—trafficked into it. In most cases, they have
no choice.
In order to avoid detection (in some
cases aided and
abetted by the police) and
cater to male buyers’ demand for sex with different women, pimps and the gangs
and crime syndicates they work for have turned sex trafficking into a highly
mobile enterprise, with trafficked girls, boys and women constantly being moved
from city to city, state to state, and country to country.
For instance, the
Baltimore-Washington area, referred to as The Circuit, with its I-95 corridor dotted with rest stops, bus
stations and truck stops, is a hub for the sex trade.
No doubt about it: this is a highly
profitable, highly organized and highly sophisticated sex trafficking business
that operates in towns large and small, raking in
upwards of $9.5 billion a year in the U.S. alone by abducting and selling young girls for sex.
Every year, the girls being bought
and sold gets younger and younger.
The average age of those being
trafficked is 13. Yet as the head of a group that combats trafficking pointed
out,
“Let’s think about what average
means. That means there are children younger than 13. That means 8-, 9-, 10-year-olds.“
“For every 10 women rescued, there
are 50 to 100 more women who are brought in by the traffickers. Unfortunately,
they’re not 18- or 20-year-olds anymore,” noted a 25-year-old victim of
trafficking. “They’re minors
as young as 13 who are being trafficked. They’re little girls.”
Where did this appetite for young
girls come from?
Look around you.
Young girls have been sexualized for
years now in music videos, on billboards, in television ads, and in clothing
stores. Marketers have created a demand for young flesh and a ready supply of
over-sexualized children.
“All it takes is one look at MySpace
photos of teens to see examples—if they aren’t imitating porn they’ve actually
seen, they’re imitating the porn-inspired images and poses they’ve absorbed
elsewhere,” writes Jessica Bennett
for Newsweek. “Latex,
corsets and stripper heels, once the fashion of porn stars, have made their way
into middle and high school.”
This is what Bennett refers to as the
“pornification of a generation.”
“In a market that sells high heels
for babies and thongs for tweens, it doesn’t take a genius to see that sex, if not porn, has invaded our
lives,” concludes Bennett. “Whether
we welcome it or not, television brings it into our living rooms and the Web
brings it into our bedrooms. According to a 2007 study from the University of
Alberta, as many as 90 percent of boys and 70 percent of girls aged 13 to 14
have accessed sexually explicit content at least once.”
In other words, the culture is
grooming these young people to be preyed upon by sexual predators. And then we
wonder why our young women are being preyed on, trafficked and abused?
Social media makes it all too easy.
As one news center reported,
“Finding girls is easy for
pimps. They look on
MySpace, Facebook, and other social networks. They and their assistants cruise malls, high
schools and middle schools. They pick them up at bus stops. On the trolley.
Girl-to-girl recruitment sometimes happens.”
Foster homes and youth shelters have
also become prime targets for
traffickers.
Rarely do these girls enter into
prostitution voluntarily. Many start out as runaways or throwaways, only to be
snatched up by pimps or larger sex rings. Others, persuaded to meet up with a
stranger after interacting online through one of the many social networking
sites, find themselves quickly initiated into their new lives as sex slaves.
Debbie, a straight-A student who belonged to a close-knit
Air Force family living in Phoenix, Ariz., is an example of this trading of
flesh. Debbie was 15 when she was snatched from her driveway by an
acquaintance-friend. Forced into a car, Debbie was bound and taken to an
unknown location, held at gunpoint and raped by multiple men. She was then
crammed into a small dog kennel and forced to eat dog biscuits. Debbie’s
captors advertised her services on Craigslist. Those who responded were often
married with children, and the money that Debbie “earned” for sex was given to
her kidnappers. The gang raping continued. After searching the apartment where
Debbie was held captive, police finally found Debbie stuffed in a drawer under a
bed. Her harrowing ordeal lasted for 40 days.
While Debbie was fortunate enough to
be rescued, others are not so lucky. According to the National Center for
Missing and Exploited Children, nearly
800,000 children go missing every year (roughly 2,185 children a day).
With a growing demand for sexual
slavery and an endless supply of girls and women who can be targeted for
abduction, this is not a problem that’s going away anytime soon.
For those trafficked, it’s a
nightmare from beginning to end.
Those being sold for sex have
an average life expectancy of seven
years, and those years
are a living nightmare of endless rape, forced drugging, humiliation,
degradation, threats, disease, pregnancies, abortions, miscarriages, torture,
pain, and always the constant fear of being killed or, worse, having those you
love hurt or killed.
Peter Landesman paints the full horrors of life for those
victims of the sex trade in his New York Times article “The Girls Next
Door”:
Andrea told me that she and the other
children she was held with were frequently beaten to keep them off-balance and
obedient. Sometimes they were videotaped while being forced to have sex with
adults or one another. Often, she said, she was asked to play roles: the
therapist patient or the obedient daughter. Her cell of sex traffickers offered
three age ranges of sex partners–toddler to age 4, 5 to 12 and teens–as well as
what she called a “damage group.” “In the damage group, they can hit you or do
anything they want to,” she explained. “Though sex always hurts when you are
little, so it’s always violent, everything was much more painful once you were
placed in the damage group.”
What Andrea described next shows just how depraved some portions of
American society have become.
“They’d get you hungry then to train you”
to have oral sex. “They put honey on a man. For the littlest kids, you had to
learn not to gag. And they would push things in you so you would open up
better. We learned responses. Like if they wanted us to be sultry or sexy or
scared. Most of them wanted you scared. When I got older, I’d teach the younger
kids how to float away so things didn’t hurt.”
Immigration and customs enforcement
agents at the Cyber Crimes Center in Fairfax, Va., report that when it comes to
sex, the appetites of many Americans have now changed. What was once considered
abnormal is now the norm. These agents are tracking a clear spike in
the demand for harder-core pornography on the Internet. As one agent noted,
“We’ve become desensitized by the
soft stuff; now we need a harder and harder hit.”
This trend is reflected by the
treatment many of the girls receive at the hands of the drug traffickers and
the men who purchase them. Peter Landesman interviewed Rosario, a Mexican woman who had been trafficked to New York
and held captive for a number of years. She said:
“In America, we had ‘special jobs.’
Oral sex, anal sex, often with many men. Sex is now more adventurous, harder.”
A common thread woven through most
survivors’ experiences is being forced to go
without sleep or food until they have met their sex quota of at least 40 men. One woman recounts how her trafficker made her lie
face down on the floor when she was pregnant and then literally jumped on her
back, forcing her to miscarry.
Holly Austin
Smith (image on the left) was abducted when she was 14
years old, raped, and then forced to prostitute herself. Her pimp, when brought
to trial, was only made to serve a year in prison.
Barbara Amaya was
repeatedly sold between traffickers, abused, shot, stabbed, raped, kidnapped,
trafficked, beaten, and jailed all before she was 18 years old.
“I had a quota that I was supposed to
fill every night. And if I didn’t have that amount of money, I would get beat,
thrown down the stairs. He beat me once with wire coat hangers, the kind you
hang up clothes, he straightened it out and my whole back was bleeding.”
As David McSwane recounts in a chilling piece for the Herald-Tribune:
“In Oakland Park, an industrial Fort
Lauderdale suburb, federal agents in 2011 encountered a brothel operated by a
married couple. Inside ‘The Boom Boom Room,’ as it was known, customers paid a
fee and were given a condom and a timer and left alone with one of the
brothel’s eight teenagers, children as young as 13. A 16-year-old foster child
testified that he acted as security, while a 17-year-old girl told a federal
judge she was forced to have sex with as many as 20 men a night.”
One particular sex trafficking ring
catered specifically to migrant workers employed seasonally on farms throughout
the southeastern states, especially the
Carolinas and Georgia, although
it’s a flourishing business in every state in the country. Traffickers
transport the women from farm to farm, where migrant workers would line up
outside shacks, as many as 30
at a time, to have sex with
them before they were transported to yet another farm where the process would
begin all over again.
This growing evil is, for all intents
and purposes, out in the open.
Trafficked women and children are advertised
on the internet, transported on the interstate, and bought and sold in swanky
hotels.
Indeed, as I make clear in my
book Battlefield
America: The War on the American People, the government’s war on sex trafficking—much like
the government’s war on terrorism, drugs and crime—has become a perfect
excuse for inflicting more police state tactics (police check points, searches,
surveillance, and heightened security) on a vulnerable public, while doing little to make our communities safer.
So what can you do?
Educate yourselves and your children
about this growing menace in our communities.
Stop feeding the monster: Sex
trafficking is part of a larger continuum in America that runs the gamut from
homelessness, poverty, and self-esteem issues to sexualized television, the
glorification of a pimp/ho culture—what is often referred to as the
pornification of America—and a billion dollar sex industry built on the back of
pornography, music, entertainment, etc.
This epidemic is largely one of our
own making, especially in a corporate age where the value placed on human life
takes a backseat to profit. It is estimated that the porn industry
brings in more money than Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Yahoo.
Call on your city councils, elected
officials and police departments to make the battle against sex trafficking a
top priority, more so even than the so-called war on terror and drugs and the
militarization of law enforcement.
Stop prosecuting adults for
victimless “crimes” such as growing lettuce in their front yard and focus on
putting away the pimps and buyers who victimize these young women.
Finally, the police need to do a better job of training,
identifying and responding to these issues; communities and social services
need to do a better job of protecting runaways, who are the primary targets of
traffickers; legislators need to pass legislation aimed at prosecuting
traffickers and “johns,” the buyers who drive the demand for sex slaves; and
hotels need to stop enabling these traffickers, by providing them with rooms
and cover for their dirty deeds.
That so many women and children continue
to be victimized, brutalized and treated like human cargo is due to three
things: one, a consumer demand that is increasingly lucrative for everyone
involved—except the victims; two, a level of corruption so invasive on both a
local and international scale that there is little hope of working through
established channels for change; and three, an eerie silence from individuals
who fail to speak out against such atrocities.
But the truth is that we are all
guilty of contributing to this human suffering. The traffickers are guilty. The
consumers are guilty. The corrupt law enforcement officials are guilty. The
women’s groups who do nothing are guilty. The foreign peacekeepers and aid
workers who contribute to the demand for sex slaves are guilty. Most of all,
every individual who does not raise a hue and cry over the atrocities being
committed against women and children in almost every nation around the
globe—including the United States—is guilty.
Constitutional attorney and author John
W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His new book Battlefield
America: The War on the American People (SelectBooks, 2015) is available online
at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org.
The original source of this article
is The Rutherford
Institute
Copyright © John W. Whitehead, The Rutherford
Institute, 2019
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